Claudia Mesch

Claudia Mesch
Mesch in 2016
Born	Ulrike Claudia Mesch
Academic work
Discipline	Art History Visual Culture
Institutions	Arizona State University

Claudia Mesch is an American art historian and critic who writes on developments in 20th-century and contemporary art and film. She is author of Joseph Beuys: The Reader; Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys; Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945; and the artist biography Joseph Beuys. Some of these titles have appeared in Chinese, French, Spanish and Italian translation. She is a recognized authority on visual culture after 1945.

Education and career

Mesch was born in Chicago, Illinois. She attended Yale College, receiving a B.A. in Germanic Literature in 1982. Upon graduation she was awarded a Fulbright-Hayes grant and traveled throughout Europe, visiting cities in the German Democratic Republic. A student of the modernist art historian Albert Boime and film theorist Peter Wollen (University of California at Los Angeles, M.A. 1990), she completed a doctorate in art history in 1997 from the University of Chicago. She is professor of art history at Arizona State University.

Art history

Mesch's books and essays examine modern art's transnational cultural exchanges across disciplinary and other borders, with a focus on German modernism. More generally she has examined art’s global engagement with politics, with games and game classification, and with the occult sciences.

An expert on the work of West German artist Joseph Beuys, she has published a biography of the artist (2017) and co-edited the critical anthology Joseph Beuys: The Reader (2007). Mesch has furthermore explored Beuys' investigations of the material of lead (2021) as well as his development of the vitrine as sculptural practice (2013).

Mesch published one of the earliest post-reunification reappraisals of German-German art during the Cold War era in English language. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (2008) forwards the progressive notion that art in the former GDR merits art historical analysis. Mesch argues that despite the state policies that policed transnational exchange, the art histories of the two Germanys remained deeply entwined during the Cold War, since key cultural and artistic developments in the GDR continued to impact the artscene in the Federal Republic of Germany, and vice versa. Among the cultural developments Mesch discusses are the numerous emigrations or defections of GDR artist-exiles to the Federal Republic which marked the era, and which included Gerhard Richter, who would become the most renowned German painter of the late-20th century, as well as figures such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Eugen Schönebeck. Another prominent Cold War development is the commitment to socialism and the institutional critique pursued by a contingent of students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, most directly Chris Reinecke and Jörg Immendorff, and the latter’s secret transborder artistic exchanges with GDR artist A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler). The book traces lesser-known GDR artists and the international roster of West-Berlin based artists who critiqued the state and the rise of corporate culture: Manfred Butzmann, Erhard Monden, the Clara Mosch group, Willi Sitte, and Wolfgang Mattheuer in the GDR; and in artworks beginning in the 1960s in West Berlin by artists Stanley Brouwn, Wolf Vostell, Beuys, K.P. Brehmer, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, Ed Kienholz, Allan Kaprow, and, emerging around 1980, the art group/artists’ space Büro Berlin featuring work by Katja Ka (Katja Hajek), Una H. Moehrke, Hermann Pitz, Res Ingold, Raimund Kummer and Fritz Rahmann, among others.

Her book Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change since 1945 (2013) foregrounds global modern and postmodern artists who have been marginalized in art history because of their distinct political positions—in terms of notions of postcolonial, feminist and queer equality, environmentalism and anti-globalization. She is also contributing editor of the college textbook Art History: A Thematic Approach, Renaissance to the Present (Cognella Inc., preliminary edition 2024).

Other essays have considered the figure of Ulrike Meinhof and postwar feminism as analyzed in Yvonne Rainer's film Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979); and the Surrealists' historical exploration of games as a path to collectivity, and of the occult as an alternative historiography of visual art and culture.

As an art and film critic, her review of the 1998 Tom Tykwer film Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) is among her most cited. Patricia Kelly, writing for the caa.reviews Centennial project, has distinguished Mesch's multi-book review “Rethinking Conceptual Art” (2002) as one of the most consulted in the history of that publication. A recent focus of her critical writing is Indigenous modern art's critical engagement with politics.

With art historians Amy Winter and Samantha Kavky, Mesch is a founding editor of the open access e-journal Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, which began publication in 2007. The JSA has published English translations of primary and secondary texts relating to Surrealism in the Americas, and, new research in the field by Marie Mauzé, Graciela Speranza, Katharine Conley, David Craven, Ian Walker, Jonathan Eburne, W. Jackson Rushing III, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Carlos Segoviano, Michele Greet, and Paulina Caro Troncoso, among others.

Selected works

Books

• Joseph Beuys (Reaktion Books, 2017); Chinese edition 2024 (Icons, Beijing); Italian edition 2024 (postmedia books, Milan)
• Art and Politics: a Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945 (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2013)
• Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2008); paperback edition 2017; Spanish translation, 2018 (Mexico City: UNAM)
• Joseph Beuys: the Reader, co-edited with Viola Michely (MIT Press/I.B. Tauris, 2007); French translation 2015 (Dijon: Les Presses du reel)
• Art History, a Thematic Approach: Renaissance to the Present (Cognella Press, 2024), with Karen L. Carter, Samantha Kavky and Keri Watson

Chapters and articles

• “'Mankind needs some lead so as to be somewhat heavier’: Beuys, Alchemy, and Duchamp”, in Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art, Silvia Bottinelli and Sharon Hecker, eds. (Bloomsbury Press, 2021), 139-160
• ”’Sculpture in Fog’: Beuys’ Vitrines," in John Welchman, ed., Sculpture and Vitrine (Ashgate and The Henry Moore Institute, 2013), 121-142.
• "Serious Play: Games and Early Twentieth-Century Modernism," reprinted in David Getsy, ed., From Diversion to Subversion: Games, Play, and Twentieth-Century Art (Pennsylvania State Press, 2011), 60- 72.
• "Post-Meinhof Feminism: Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979)," in Berlin Divided City, Sabine Hake and Philip Broadbent, Eds. (Berghahn Books, 2010), 135- 144.
• "Game-Based Learning in the Introductory Art History Course: Weaving Historical Contexts and Incentivizing Critical Looking," AMPS Proceedings Series 28:1, A Focus on Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning and Research in the Modern Academy, ed. Zain Adil (2023): 230-239.
• "Shadows of the Colonial: David Hare, Empathetic Perception and Ethnographic Surrealism in the 1940s," South Central Review Vol. 32 No. 1 (Spring 2015): 76-95.
• "‘What Makes Indians Laugh’: Surrealism, Ritual and Return in Steven Yazzie and Joseph Beuys," Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (2012) Vol. 6 No. 1 (December, 2012): 39-60.
• "Cold War Games and Postwar Art," Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, Vol. 6.1 (Winter, 2006).
• "Serious Play: Games and Early Twentieth-Century Modernism", The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 (Fall 2005): 9-30.
• "Vostell's Ruins: Dé-collage and the Mnemotechnic Space of the Postwar City," Art History Vol. 23 No.1 (March 2000): 88-115.

Criticism

• "Trauma and Democracy in Recent Political Art: Postcommodity at Documenta 14," Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 10:1 (2019): 115-120
• "Probing the Body Politic: limits, memory and anxiety in art after democracy can no longer be assumed," esse arts + opinions, 92 (Winter, 2018): Special Issue on Democracy (Montréal)
• Review of Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript (Verso, 2010), Theory, Culture and Society Vol. 28, No. 3 (June, 2011): 162-164.
• Review of Heike Fuhlbrügge, Joseph Beuys und die anthropologische Landschaft (Reimer Verlag, 2008), Journal für Kunstgeschichte 12: 4 (2008): 307-311.
• "Thinking the ‘Post-Indian’: ‘Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World’ at the Heard Museum," exhibition review for the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (Vol. 2, Issue 2, July, 2008).
• "‘Ezra Pound is back’: Klaus Ottmann’s SITE Santa Fe Biennial," exhibition review, The Art Book 14, No.3 (U.K.; August, 2007): 65-66.
• "Rethinking Conceptual Art," caa.reviews (Summer, 2002).
• "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000).